General comments on style sheets and WAI FP work

Jason White writes:

 > CSS 2 will be of significant benefit in the development of a more
 > accessible web, since its widespread adoption will discourage authors from
 > abusing the HTML markup in ways that are detrimental to the creation of
 > braille and audio representations of a document.

Indeed, this was one of the key motivations for starting the work
on CSS.

 > More generally, I think there is an important strategic decision which the
 > WAI Formats and Protocols Working Group will soon be obliged to make,
 > namely, how far to push the development of CSS, or whether the needs of
 > accessibility would better be served by concentrating principally on other
 > style mechanisms, such as the XML style language, which will reputedly be
 > based on DSSSL.

There are several XML style languages, including CSS and DSSSL. You're
probably referring to XSL, the "eXtensible Style Language", which has
proposed to W3C [1].

[1] http://www.w3.org/Submission/1997/13

 > The ability to transform the structure of an HTML document by reorganising
 > its elements is an important aspect of any style mechanism that can
 > adequately meet the needs of braille and audio users. So far, there has
 > been no indication of an intention to include such tree transformation
 > properties in CSS

This has been true in the past; CSS is intended for documents where
tree transformations are not required. However, another recent
submission to W3C builds on CSS to provide "Simple Tree Transformation
Sheets".

[2] http://www.w3.org/Submission/1997/16/

Regards,

-h&kon

H   å   k   o   n      W   i   u   m       L   i   e
howcome@w3.org      http://www.w3.org/people/howcome
World     W      i     d     e       Web  Consortium

Received on Monday, 10 November 1997 05:28:08 UTC